Define engagement: You can ask just about any instructor to tell you who their most engaged students are, and they will be able to do it. However, it's not clear that their definitions of engagement will be the same. I define engagement as: "The time and effort students invest in educational activities that are empirically linked to desired college outcomes".

Using engagement measurement tools: I have used a modified version of the National Survey of Student Engagement to measure engagement in my research. More recently, I have been developing a coding manual to measure behavioural indices of engagement in the classroom. I've seen researchers use a few other ways to measure engagement such as evaluating how much time students spend on a task, assessing the time they spend using learning technologies, the number of times they ask a question in class.

Resources: My research focuses on how social media such as Facebook and Twitter can be used to improve student and academic engagement and how this relates to learning.

Surveys have a role to play: Having a national survey instrument that requires institutions to benchmark against one another has been useful in understanding what engagement might mean, as opposed to student satisfaction, and as an alternative to measuring graduate outcomes in terms of employment. For those interested in how this plays out in Australia, we have the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE), developed from the US equivalent, the NSSE.

Keep staff-student ratios low: It is very difficult for HEIs focused on efficiency to engage with the diversity of student agendas at an institutional level, but this is actually something academics do every time they walk into the room or hop online. So we need to be very careful with issues such as staff-student ratios, because it is the basic resourcing of higher education, such as class sizes, that probably makes the biggest difference to the student experience of engagement. It's hard to feel authentically engaged with your learning if your lecturers don't know your name.

Not all students can take up the engagement opportunity: Engagement is very hard work for the student, and some have to keep the studies in perspective in the context of your overall situation. For students with acute carer responsibilities, for example, sometimes just getting by is a triumph. So we also need to be careful with setting up 'gold standard' expectations for engagement that can make some 'just getting by' students feel deficient.

To raise standards of education, ask students: Students are the experts on being a student. They know what makes learning easier, they know what makes it impossible. They know what switches them on and off, so engage with them in dialogue, and then partner with them to change standards of teaching.

Mentoring is a good strategy: Mentors are students who are reaching their peers in the year below to encourage engagement within the school community, with their studies and with society. Everyone wins as disengaged students can be identified early on and mentors have themselves benefited from the support of others.

Do not accept student apathy: We need to ask how we can get into an open dialogue with those students to see what has disinterested/disengaged them to the point of apathy. If we just leave students to enter the rest of their lives with an entrenched sense of apathy towards themselves and their opportunities we've done them a huge disservice.

Beyond the rhetoric, student engagement matters: Engagement has become a buzzword for three reasons:

1. Massification of HE: Universities have grown enormously over the past 20 years. That means that the relationship between students and their lecturers, and so on, has changed. Knowing and understanding each other by osmosis and regular contact isn't possible.

2. Credence from National Union of Students (NUS) and students' unions: Over the past five or six years there's been a noticeable increase in the resources the NUS and local students' union have committed to making sure that they properly support student representatives and engage in constructive, evidence-based dialogue with HEIs.

3. Government policy: The recent white paper lists engagement as one of the key to their transformation in higher education.

In spite of whatever is motivating recent interest, universities must believe that engagement matters because higher education is not about spoon-feeding students information and skills.

Claire Herbert is senior policy adviser at the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) which promotes and supports equality and diversity for staff and students in higher education

Institutions need to remember that student engagement is an opportunity to demonstrate that core institutional values are inclusive: It provides an opportunity to increase (and maintain) student numbers and improve the quality of the service they provide. In addition, listening and reacting to students can help develop good relations between different groups of students, and create an inclusive culture and experience for everyone. There are plenty of ways for institutions to engage with its students, and many of them are not resource-intensive in a time of budget and resource cuts. Universities can:

• Use their student unions and societies and engage with students and listen to what they have heard from their members

• Use data that they already collect as an indicator of student satisfaction and to sign-post engagement activities towards particular groups of students who might not be engaged

• Learn from other institutions and share good practice and ideas

• Use informal and formal mechanisms to hear from students and use the biggest variety of events, places and mediums to engage - including social media.

• Above all, do something with what you hear and communicate that to students. Empower them to make a difference and prove that their input has done something and wasn't simply a box-ticking exercise

First understand what student engagement means: There are many interpretations of the term: one relates to how and whether students are engaged, for example. motivated to learn. Another concentrates on how to actively involve students of specific backgrounds, or from specific groups in society. Thirdly and arguably the most pressing for universities at the moment is the issue of engagement in terms of student satisfaction, much encouraged by the national introduction of student surveys (the NSS here, NSSE in the US and similar work in Australia)

The interesting question is whether all these forms of engagement can connect up somehow.

There is much we can learn from private providers: It seems to me that private HE providers really do put student engagement very much central: from marketing to initial experience, to achieving success rates. Whether their approach (the business and client model) is a good thing depends on your views of what higher education is for. But even the cynical should try to keep an open mind about the processes and approaches that some of the private providers use.

Join up research and practice: There are pockets of research and development work on student engagement happening across the country, from NUS to academic research. These should be brought together and shared with those who champion engagement on a day-to-day basis on the ground. There are good ideas out there, let's hear more about them - successes and equally failures.

Resource:Student as Producer looks to re-engineer the relationship between students and teachers, making the process of learning less of a passive one and more engaging and active - through getting undergrads involved in research. Do take a look at the website if you haven't already seen it.

Reach out to students before they arrive on campus: Students are bombarded with information within their first week - from becoming a course representative to freshers fairs, volunteering, the complaints procedure and other talks. It's all too much to take in, yet induction is very closely related to a positive student experience and also the retention of students, so universities can't afford to get it wrong. The alternatives then become reaching out to students before they arrive or extending the initial induction period.

Resource: At Hull Union, we have been allowed access to our University's Virtual Learning Environment where we have successfully developed a tool which facilitates course rep training for distance students, provides a forum for students to discuss academic issues and is also a repository for useful resources.

Guard against a one-dimensional view of student engagement: Experienced, mature students are usually highly motivated and can be very engaged in the programme of study but they may not be engaged more broadly, in the sense of feeling part of a community or experiencing a real sense of belonging - they may be dashing off and only really experiencing taught sessions so we need to think much more carefully about the very different motivations and needs to make sure they do not have a very one-dimensional experience of HE.

All students already engage: The term engagement has been so conquered over recent years by an association to student reps, informed students or those that turn up. However if we open up that term, it might be worth considering that all students actually engage - but in very different ways, to suit them, their need and wants. Just because a student doesn't turn up to a union meeting or fill in the NSS - does that mean they are not contributing to their education?

Use social media but not to the exclusion of other tools: Social media has become a part of so many people's lives that those of us who work or a part of student engagement would be daft not to use it. However, we must be careful not to fixate on social media as the only answer or method. Otherwise we will fall into the hole of excluding those who don't engage.